Il De aspiratione di Giovanni Pontano e la cultura del suo tempo: Con un' Antologia di brani scelti dal De aspiratione in edizione critica corredata di introduzione, traduzione e commento, and: Uno studente alla scuola del pontano a Napoli: Le Recollecte del MS. 1368 (T.5.5) della Biblioteca Angelica di Roma (review)

Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) was the central figure of southern Italian humanism during the second half of the fifteenth century. Famed as a Latin literateur, Pontano's interests extended to astrology, astronomy, meteorology, and agriculture; his poetry also treated more conventional topics such as conjugal love and courtly life, while as a prose writer he filled volumes with dialogues and treatises on morals and politics, besides writing a neo-Sallustian history of Ferrante I's war from 1458 to 1464 to secure the Neapolitan succession. He had a notable career too as chancellor, diplomat, and adviser to the Aragonese Kings of Naples, Ferrante I, Alfonso II, and Ferrante II (Ferrandino).

Pontano's activities as a teacher have attracted less scholarly attention, although it is well-known that he was preceptor to Alfonso I's nephew, Juan of Navarre, and that he succeeded Panormita (d. 1471) as tutor to Ferrante I's son, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria. Toward the end of his first decade in Naples (1448–57), while establishing himself at the royal court and chancery, Pontano ran a private school for the scions of the Neapolitan aristocracy; according to another court humanist in Naples, Bartolomeo Facio (d. 1457), the curriculum of the school (ludus) focused on the studia humanitatis.

Two principal witnesses to Pontano's activities at his humanist school have survived. One is the compendium on Latin orthography and pronunciation, De aspiratione, in gestation since the 1450s but evidently redacted in various stages during the later 1460s and revised thereafter until its first printing in 1481. Ostensibly a work of erudite philology directed against barbarous medieval grammarians, this text was in fact explicitly intended by Pontano for use by adolescents at school. De aspiratione is a type of lexicon, organized in roughly alphabetical order, and focused on which Latin words contain aspirated consonants (usually indicated by the insertion of an h), often touching on such controversial issues as the spelling of mihi and nihil, over which Pontano launched a polemic against Leonardo Bruni, who had preferred michi and nichil; aspiration was a topic that, Pontano claimed, had hitherto been treated only by an obscure grammarian called Apuleius (ca. 1000–1100), whose work he had used in his own adolescent studies at Padua (evidently in 1451) and against whom he directed further polemics. The treatise, enriched at the various stages of its redaction, often transcends the normal limits of the schoolroom, demonstrating Pontano's vast philological erudition and enormous breadth of classical interests, and revealing a particular preoccupation with mythology and epigraphy. He did not hesitate to indulge in typically humanist one-upmanship at the expense of such grammatical luminaries as Tortelli and Perotti, who treated Apuleius as an authoritative and reliable source.

Pontano's pedagogy has attracted less scholarly attention than his poetic and other prose production in part because De aspiratione achieved a limited circulation in manuscript and print; although the work had an incunabular printing in 1481 and five further editions up to 1556, this was an exiguous early publication record in comparison with such school-level bestsellers as Perotti's Rudimenta grammatices or Agostino Dati's Elegantiolae...